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Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) was generally regarded as one of the best street photographers of his generation. And while he would probably not quarrel with the use of superlatives in his case, he did object to being pigeonholed as a street photographer. In truth, he photographed anything and everything, shooting hundreds of images every day, using a hand-held camera and wide-angle lens. Over his lifetime, he shot millions of images, with some 100 thousand unprocessed negatives and 30 thousand color slides left over when he died at age 56
Winogrand once said he sometimes felt like “the world is a place I bought ticket to. It's a big show for me, as if it wouldn't happen if I wasn't there with a camera.” Working in an era before digital photography, he was obliged to stop only when he had to reload film. Did he feel like he was missing photographs when he had to reload? "There are no photographs while I'm reloading,” he said.
Strictly speaking, it’s true there are no photographs if you don’t take them. But the implication seems to be that nothing occurs when you aren’t shooting. As a photographer, I also occasionally have the uncanny sense that what I see in the viewfinder of my camera is something I'm being shown. But I’ve also missed enough good shots to ever claim that nothing happens if I don’t take the picture.
Winogrand was by no means alone in his solipsistic approach to his art. “Nature, no less than Life, is an imitation of Art,” Oscar Wilde once proclaimed (capitalization his). “Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.” He continued in this vein: “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”
Philosophically, Wilde owes a debt to Bishop Berkeley’s famous dictum, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived.) The 18th-century Anglican prelate was an exponent of what he deemed “immaterialism,” which denied the independent existence of material objects in the world. What appears to us as solid objects are actually ideas perceived through the senses. But what happens if no one is looking? According to Berkeley, the world continues to exist because God is always watching.
With God looking over our shoulder, there would appear to be little opportunity for reality to blink off and on when we’re not taking pictures or otherwise paying attention. Even if there is no God, common sense suggests the world doesn’t require spectators to put on a show. So if reality isn’t some kind of command performance, why do I sometimes get the sense that what I see through the viewfinder of my camera is a show put on just for me?
In the last century, quantum physicists confirmed at least part of Berkeley’s theory. Material objects do not exist independently of an observer, even if the world is more than just ideas perceived through the senses. “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived,” wrote physicist Erwin Schrödinger. “Subject and object are only one.” For a photographer, the camera becomes the link between the thoughts and perceptions that seemingly exist “in here” and the world “out there.” But it is really the act of seeing that binds them together as aspects of the same thing.
Physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term “black holes” in astronomy, has theorized that we live in a “participatory universe” in which consciousness is not a bystander to physical reality but is an essential element in its formation. In a sense, you could say the universe comes into being because we are here to witness it. But while I may think it’s posing for me when I snap a picture, I am merely the instrument that allows the universe to take a selfie.
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